ABC....H: Healing.

It all started with an honest and innocent diary I held religiously since I was 9.

On my 11th birthday, while rereading all of it, I laughed at myself and decided to detach the written papers off of it and restart it , so without completely destroying the sheets I put them in my closet and on the same notebook I started a fresh new page calling it : `a new chapter of my life.`

The next day, when Dad came to pick me up from school, I had the luxury of an endless moral lesson of how ungrateful, unpolite and insolite I was , and we live in the suburbs of Rabat, it was a long discour.

They found the papers . They read the papers!! And i can tell you the taste of unfairness is pretty sour.

The three following weeks I had the other luxury of the blame/guilt treatment from the family members and inenventably from myself.

And it didn`t end when everything in the house `came back to normal` because I didn`t come back to normal.

I drastically stopped writing and consequently started hesitating to express my thoughts and feelings while talking, afraid it will be too insolite and too unpolite to tell the truth.

I mean, what do you expect from a child who has been blamed for secretly reporting to herself what she`s been through and how she feels about that, AND politely never bringing it up neither by words nor behaviors?

And God knows it was all true and God knows I was forgiving the people I wrote about in those papers, though they sounded like my enemies in there.

It took me 4 years before starting a new diary where I only reported the good things that were happening to me, and 2 other years to actually come back to exposing -to myself only- some raw and authentic feelings.

Two other years later and here I am, October 15th midnight, holding both a diary and a blog where I`m sharing this chapter of my life that affected me to a point that I couldn`t even describe properly.

But now, all I see of it is a journey of growth & revival but most importantly one of healing.

For me, healing is when your wounds no longer represent an obstacle between you and your better self nor your dreams, it`s when despite your scars and despite still feeling emotional or weak when recalling the memory, you are able to take control and not let it take over everything, you`ve just moved on fearlessly and strongly.

If you invite me over around a bonfire, some wool blankets and moroccan tea (near the beach preferebly) we would spend the whole night rolling before each other an endless roll of images from similar events -no matter how tiny- that we presume had an effect on who we are.

But here we are now. We survived. And perhaps, we healed. I did, however a lot of parts of me are still on a healing process, but I learned to strive for progress not perfection.

I also learned from our beloved prophet, peace be upon him, that forgivness, peacefulness and kindness are the smartest types of revenge and the strongest ways of healing : he have been rejected by his own tribe, his wife has been accused with unfaithfulness and they tried several times to take his life away, and still, still did he let them go when he had the opporunity to excecute the cruliest revenge any man would be craving for.

The only reason I look back on the past and dig into those painful memories is to remind myself that I`m light years away from that hole I once thought I was stuck in forever, I broke the chains a while ago , so now I have the proof that I`ve actually grown wiser, freeier, stronger and healthier, I have the proof that healing is possible again and I can nourish its resources with a forgiving heart, a peaceful soul and a kind attitude that will kill them to the point that they won`t be able to describe properly.

Last but not least, if it aches, if you still crawl into your bed and swallow both the salty taste of your tears and the sour taste of hurt, if you`re feeling so weak and suffocating that you cannot picture yourself ever surviving it, let alone recovering, just know 3 things:

These are all natural signs of the healing process, they`re the proof that you`re not giving up, that you`re being present for yourself and by yourself, you`re fighting and that alone is beautifully human;

Remember: ``And when My servants ask you, [O Muhammad], concerning Me - indeed I am near. I respond to the invocation of the supplicant when he calls upon Me.`` Al Baquara.

I wish I was there with you give you a hug or sthg , bake you some pastries so that you can replace the sour taste with something as strongly sweet as you are.